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From: perl@rdin.UUCP (Robert Perlberg)
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: Re: csh question
Message-ID: <329@rdin.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 15-Oct-83 07:53:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: rdin.329
Posted: Sat Oct 15 07:53:09 1983
Date-Received: Sun, 9-Oct-83 19:29:07 EDT
Lines: 54

cFb*
(continued from net.unix-wizards)

The C shell has a lot of nice features, especially on systems
with job control, but why does it have to be so lame in the areas
of:

multi-line constructs from the terminal,

nested foreach's from the terminal,

matching of quotes and parens,

trapping signals,

escaping meta-characters,

nesting just about anything,

variable assignments,

and so on?  It's plain to me that the reason for writing the
C shell is that someone figured that it would be easier for UNIX
programmers to use the same language in the shell as they use
in their programs.  There are a number of bogosities in this
reasoning:

The C syntax, while it may be fine for a high level description
of machine code, does not provide an effective interface to an
operating system.

While some programmers may prefer to use the same syntax in the
shell as in their programs, it makes an already user-adversary
system even more unusable by non-programmers.

At the most recent USENIX conference, a vote was taken which
determined that most C shell users write their shell scripts
in the Bourne shell.  I am not flaming about having a shell with
a C syntax.  You could have a shell with an APL syntax for all
I care; just as long as I am not forced to use it.  The problem
is that someone seems to have decided that the C shell is the
only shell worth developing.  Why can't the Bourne shell have
features like history, alias, unset, setenv, notify, and best
of all, job control?  There is absolutly nothing about these
features which is dependent upon the C syntax.  In fact, these
features would work even better in the Bourne syntax!  I use
the C shell for the job control capability.  Any time I want
to do anything involving multiple lines, signal trapping, nesting,
quoting, or anything like that, I escape to the Bourne shell.

Robert "Bourne again" Perlberg
Resource Dynamics Inc.
New York
philabs!rdin!perl